If your display is 16x16 or less, GIF and 24 bit are indistinguishable. Each frame has its own palette of 256 colors, and each color is chosen from the 24 bit color space. If you can only display 256 pixels or less, the GIF palette does not pose a limitation.

Genius. I did not consider this. My current display is 16x10, however, I need this to scale.

You might check out the method of playing animations on WS2812b LEDs I use on Game Frame

Wow! Thanks so much for putting all that code together. I should be able to test it all tonight. I was a bit concerned about the array sizes too. My current source file is 16+MB, and I expect to author larger. My machine is up to the task. I've got 16GB, and I only have to process each one once.

I didn't find a way for saveBytes() to append instead of overwriting a file.

I found this to be the single most annoying limitation with Processing. I'm used to C where you open a file handle, deal with the file in any and every way you want, then close it when done. I can't believe the designers assumed that you'd only want to atomically write a single blob of data and be done, without any way of adding to it. It's extremely short sided.

So you might want to take a look at something like FileOutputStream

I'll surely take a look, but Java is not my native language. I find many of the things it does really odd and non-intuitive.

Animated GIF can be hacked to make more than 256 colors, but the files are huge.

That and it's still not true color. It's kind of like the Amiga's HAM mode, with a palette for each line, but in this case it's a palette for each sub region.

I think that APNG would be a better format for animation, since it was designed with that in mind.

I'm still looking at that. There isn't much support for it, as it was rejected by the PNG working group for departing from their goal of creating an image format. It has a successor, MNG which is less of a hack. internally frames are still PNG, which would be easy to deal with.

zlib for the DEFLATE algorithm is going to be the issue with using APNG.

Only if you actually compress. Type 0 means no compression, so it's basically raw.

If you can't find anyone who has done this, I would revert to trying old video file formats/compression methods. Those were designed with older computers with more constrained algorithms.

yeah, unfortunately there isn't much. Gif was the king back then, and people avoided raw because of the storage and memory requirements. I'm purposefully avoiding any compression because my source is raw, and it only adds complexity.

I'm rambling... Sorry, I don't know anything about this.

No sweat. All perspectives keep me thinking and looking in different directions. I appreciate the input!

This looks promising! I'll give it a go and report back in a few... Thanks!

[Edit] no go. For whatever reason the applet crashes hard. I tried upgrading from 1.5.1 to the newest 2.x, but 2.x doesn't even open my source movie file in the sketches I had working. If I find a way to either keep a file open or append to a file I've written, I'll surely integrate the bits of code that comb over the movie and extract the values of interest. Thanks for all the help.

The 74138/139 demultiplexers. 2/3 pins can be expanded into 4/8 outputs. Useful if you have a *bunch of different devices to address on your SPI. Used commonly in address demultiplexing on 1980s microcomputers.

The issue is that the community development of all of the learning software and capabilities of the pi are based in code that has been compiled for that specific processor, and a new one would make them have to start from ground zero.

This is categorically FALSE. There are compatible boards with CPUs from other vendors that run the EXACT same distro images as the Pi.

Runs an Allwinner A20 dual core 1GHz CPU. Has native Gigabit ethernet (not USB!), has SATA, has twice the memory, has two primary USB ports (Pi only has one, shared with ethernet and two hub ports), has LVDS (better than SDI, broader compatibility), and will run RPi distro images without modification. Currently costs ~$15 more than the RPi, but it's target price is $29. Scales of economy will get it that low, but only if enough people wise up and choose this board over the RPi.

You'd better believe that Apple has it's sights set on Enterprise, and that the long crumbling Microsoft is going to fall HARD. Once word gets out that there's a product that works out of the box, that doesn't require legions of IT grunts to keep working, and has a TCO thats a fraction that of a PC, Corporate America is going to drop Microsoft like a hot rock. Diehard zealots like you are going to be flipping burgers and digging ditches.

I guess we're all dicks for giving you honest answers in your own thread where you specifically asked for our opinions. I personally think you're wasteful and lack common sense if you take a Tesla S as your drive-in drive-out car to Burning Man. That's all.

How's that reading comprehension working for you?

yes, I bury my equipment in the dust, then dig it up and piss on it to clean it. That's exactly what I'm doing...

My heart goes out to you and everyone else touched by this. I lost a friend on the playa years back, and have mourned several burners who were taken during the year in-between burns. As great as each loss was, I held tight to the fact that they lived life on their terms, and each of us has a minuscule amount of time on this earth. Mourn as you see fit, but remember those that leave us would want us to live our remaining time to the fullest.